Andy Rooney: A curmudgeon we miss

Sunday

Sep 1, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Andy Rooney has been gone for almost two years now, and I miss the old curmudgeon. I know I'm not alone in that. With so much to grouse about in our lives these days, we Americans lost a treasure when that whiny voice went still.

He was to "60 Minutes," the Sunday night news magazine, the tail that wagged the dog, bending forward from his desk to deliver Everyman sermonettes on the minutiae of ordinary lives. The bushy-eyebrowed commentator and his cluttered desk were a staple of the CBS-TV show for years, though they accounted for only three minutes at the end of the program's 60.

A reader once wrote to ask me, "What are you — the poor man's Andy Rooney?" I replied, "No, Andy is the rich man's me." It's pretentious, I admit, to use our names together in the same sentence, but our lives have intersected in a modest and curious way.

Back in 1978, Rooney's first year on the show, I mailed him a copy of a book I had done, a collection of columns from this newspaper. I told him I loved his weekly musings and we seemed to think pretty much alike. I didn't hear back, and I really never expected to.

But often the TV cameras zoomed in on the bookshelf behind him. Occasionally, you could make them out by their titles. One night when Rooney was using his bookshelf as a prop for his little essay, I spied my "Wry & Ginger" sitting up there big as life, sharing space with "A Preface to Life" by Walter Lippmann, and Fowler's "Modern English Usage," among others. I was ecstatic, but still no word from the Great One himself.

I confess I had begun to resent the lack of a response, partly because some of the Sunday night pieces sounded vaguely and suspiciously familiar to me. Then, six years after I sent him the book, I got this in the mail, dated Aug. 29, 1984. It was typed somewhat messily on an old upright typewriter, with strikeovers, missing a few commas and a couple of apostrophes, on a piece of yellowed newsroom copy paper:

"Dear Sid, You'll be pleased to hear I've finished your book already! I did enjoy it. Read a lot of it when it came but then buried your letter in a box of must-answer mail and didn't find it again until today. Sorry about that, not that I think you've been waiting at the mailbox for an answer. Sincerely, Andrew A. Rooney."

In 1999, he actually authored a book titled "Sincerely, Andy Rooney." It featured letters he had sent to readers over the years in his customary gruff and ungrammatical way. I bought a copy and enjoyed it immensely, though sadly, the one he wrote to me didn't make it past the cutting room floor. That's the way it always seemed to go between us.

Rooney wasn't just a TV personality. He also wrote a long-popular syndicated newspaper column. A small sample for old times' sake: "In most cases, it takes half a day to go to the doctor, even though you're lucky if he actually spends 20 minutes with you. They used to have one office, one examination table. They took patients one at a time. Now many of them have several little places where they store and examine patients . The nurse puts you in one, and you sit there naked while the doctor is in one of his other offices with another patient."